Customer Rating: 4.09 of 5 (11 total reviews)

Very Clear and Complete Coverage Of Web Services

After reading a couple of dissapointing web services book, I went looking for a better J2EE web services book. I was thrilled when I saw Richard Monson-Haefel had written a web services book because several years ago his wonderful EJB book got me started with EJBs. So I had high expectations for this book, and I was not dissapointed. This is the most thorough coverage of J2EE web services that I've read. Equally important as what is in the book, is what is not in the book. Web services is a topic that can be an endless pit of specifications and APIs that you will never use. By focusing on technologies that are endorsed by the Basic Profile for Web Services, this book helps you focus on those technologies that are currently useful and stable. I've found most web services books get so lost in every specification and version that they never have time to really explain the practical issues of developing web services. This book instead provides tremendous detail on the important practical issues. In addition, by focusing on the stable and interoperable aspects of web services, the book will makes it easy to see how to develop web services that will actually work and be interoperable. And most importantly, the book is clearly written, technically accurate, and easy to learn from. So I thank the author for another wonderful book and I hope he will be writing books in all the future topics I need to learn.

THE Bible for J2EE - Web Services development

J2EE Web Services by Richard Monson-Haefel is the current de-facto standard bible for Web Services development on Java. I had pre-ordered this book on Amazon and have read through this book several times in the last few months and I absolutely love this book. Richard has created a great resource for the J2EE developer that's looking to build interoperable Web Services.

Most EJB developers are already familiar with Richard Monson-Haefel's work in his OReilly EJB's book. He brings that expertise into the realm of J2EE and Web Services. In fact, this is the first book to talk about Web Services Interoperability Organization's (WS-I) Basic Profile 1.0.

WS-I is an open, industry organization chartered to promote Web services interoperability across platforms, operating systems, and programming languages. WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 is set of recommendations on how to use web services specifications to maximize interoperability. This book delves into the details of J2EE 1.4 and how we as Java developer can build and consume Web Services in a standard way.

The book starts off with an introduction to XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI before jumping into the meat, Java API for XML-Based RPC (JAX-RPC). If you don't have any experience with those technologies, the book offers a great tutorial on those items. I was particularly impressed with the treatment on XML Schemas in the 3rd chapter.

Once the basic groundwork is laid with a solid introduction to XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI, the book jumps right in the JAX-RPC platform. In fact, the middle half of the book is dedicated to JAX-RPC. JAX-RPC is a specification for making remote procedure calls via XML and SOAP over HTTP. JAX-RPC provides an easy to develop programming model for development of SOAP based Web services. You can use the RPC programming model to develop Web service clients and endpoints (server).

Once you get an overview of JAX-RPC, you jump right into building Web Services. The section on JAX-RPC is really detailed and offers a very in-depth tutorial on building Web Services. From JAX-RPC, you jump into Java API for XML Registries or JAXR. The Java API for XML Registries (JAXR) provides a uniform and standard Java API for accessing different kinds of XML Registries. An XML registry is an enabling infrastructure for building, deploying, and discovering Web services. I read through most of this section but I didn't really spend as much time on it as I should have.

The final section of the book deals with deployment. J2EE deployment is a total pain in the ass and anyone that's spent hours fighting classpath issues in ear files will agree with me. The section on deployment is very detailed and very well written. I found it extremely helpful in setting up JAX-RPC mapping files along with other deployment descriptor. I have to agree with Richard's comment at the end of Chapter 24 - Deployment descriptors sucks and have gotten overly complicated. Items like Cedric's ejbc and XDoclet have done a great job in simplified the creation of ejb and web deployment descriptors and J2EE 1.5 should really address this issue.

My only complaint about this book is the lack of downloadable source code. I did email Richard and he very graciously replied saying the book is really more of a reference than a tutorial. Hopefully he'll change his mind and put together a source code distribution for this book.

If you are going to be building Web Services in Java, want to learn more about the alphabet soup of Web Services or just want to learn more about WS-I and BP1 and how to build interoperable Web Services, this is the book for you. I found this book to be very helpful and plan to use it for my Web Services class. This book is a must for any J2EE Web Services developer.

Nothing special - Good intro but very light on examples

This book disappointed me as it failed to meet my expectations. If compare this book to the author's EJB book then you will be disappointed like me as well. This book explained the basics of Web services and its J2EE examples. Although the content and examples are well paced at the end all I found is this book lacks a real world architecture and implementation strategies. Like me, many reviewers told the same as this book does'nt cover much more than the J2EE 1.4 tutorial in aspects of Web services. I felt like I lost my grasp of Java examples at the end as the book did'nt finish how to put all the APIs together.